Literary Perspectives on Prejudice: Four Essays Examined

Introduction: Can Literature End Prejudice?

If you walk into a bookstore or browse online, you will find hundreds — in fact, thousands — of essays, books, articles, and speeches about prejudice. Most of them are, of course, against prejudice. Before reading any of them, you can reasonably expect to encounter phrases such as "don't have prejudice against people," "prejudice results in downfall," or "prejudice is a bad thing." But what puzzles the mind is whether phrases like these are enough to actually end prejudice. Does a moral lesson at the end of a very moving story convince a person not to judge others and to treat everyone equally? Does it truly change behavior? In order to understand what prejudice is, must a person experience it firsthand?

To explore this question, it is worth examining a range of literary nonfiction works and considering what they teach us about prejudice. The central aim of this essay is to assess how convincingly four literary essays communicate the need to end prejudice. Each of these essays offers its own perspective on prejudice and, naturally, carries a moral lesson. Among the many works that attempt to convince readers that prejudice is wrong, a minority seem genuinely capable of doing so on a deeper, almost unconscious level. Every time a reader reaches the end of such a story, a psychological effect takes hold — whether lasting or fleeting. What matters is how long that effect endures. For many readers, a book can be life-changing; for others, the feeling fades quickly. Much depends on how convincing the writer's ideas are and how deftly they bring their story to a satisfying close.

Brent Staples and the Mirror of Racial Stereotyping

In the essay Just Walk on By, Brent Staples walks the reader through a series of personal misfortunes in Chicago. He begins with an account of being mistaken for a mugger one night while walking down a street. What is essential to understand here is how Staples captures the essence of racist stereotypes accumulated over generations. His presence on the street — his gait, the lateness of the hour, and the color of his skin — led a young woman to identify him as a threat. As Staples writes: "To her, the youngish black man . . . seemed menacingly close" (153).

The words Staples chooses throughout his essay are deliberate and carefully selected. He returns repeatedly to three words: "black," "night," and "woman." These words are interconnected and serve a precise rhetorical purpose. When a reader thinks of "night," the immediate associations are a dark sky, shadowed streets, and the possibility of danger. Staples introduces himself as part of that darkness, linking the perceived threat of the night to the color of his own skin.

Staples opens his essay with the line: "My first victim was a woman — white" (153). The word "victim" immediately suggests to the reader that violence is about to follow. Before finishing the first sentence, the reader has already formed a prejudice against Staples, assuming he is a dangerous or even murderous figure. This is precisely the reaction Staples intends to provoke. By inducing this prejudice in the reader through word choice alone, he holds up a mirror: the reader who has just judged him based on language is no different from the woman who judged him based on the color of his skin at night. Staples forces the reader to confront that instinct directly.

Staples's essay not only allows readers to understand the prejudice he faced as a young Black man but also draws attention to how innocent, civilized members of society are treated as outsiders solely because of their race. He connects the color of his skin to the fear others project onto him — a fear comparable to the instinctive unease people feel in the dark of night. He wants readers to recognize these associations in their own thinking, triggering reflection on moments when they may have made the same connections themselves.

The effectiveness of Staples's essay on any given reader depends largely on how much that reader can relate to his experiences. Have they suffered similar prejudice? Or have they been the ones who inflicted it? Readers from either position will absorb Staples's message far more deeply than a reader who has never encountered a comparable situation — one who has neither faced public humiliation nor been the agent of authoritative discrimination.

Zora Neale Hurston and the Celebration of Identity

The story presented in How It Feels to Be Colored Me by Zora Neale Hurston is another powerful example of how literature engages with the problem of racial prejudice. Hurston uses a series of remarkable metaphors to depict her experiences as an African American woman in an earlier era. At the time she was writing, the abolition of slavery was only about sixty years in the past. She spent her childhood in Eatonville, Florida — at the time a town of residence exclusive to African Americans — where white people passed through only on their way to other destinations. The young Hurston would occasionally speak to these travelers, welcoming them warmly. But when she left Eatonville for Jacksonville at the age of thirteen, everything changed. As she writes: "I am colored, but I offer . . . an Indian chief" (159).

A change of place changed the person she was becoming and her entire outlook on life. The travelers who passed through Eatonville had no lasting interest in its residents, and as mere passersby they had little opportunity or reason to show prejudice. Moreover, a child — regardless of skin color — is less likely to face overt prejudice than an adult navigating a world structured by racial hierarchy. Once in Jacksonville, Hurston encountered treatment starkly different from what she had known. Even as people around her reminded her of her status as a descendant of enslaved people, it did nothing to diminish her spirit. Unlike many others in her position, Hurston refused to define herself by others' judgments. "I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background," she writes (159).

Hurston describes a vivid scene in which she sits beside a white person at a jazz performance. She recounts the overwhelming, almost ecstatic experience of the music — an experience the white person beside her could only partially access. Through this metaphorical contrast, she illuminates a deep cultural and emotional disparity between the two races. She goes further, expressing her rejection of racial categories altogether: there are moments, she writes, when she feels like simply a human being, beyond race — and those moments tend to occur when she is alone with nature rather than among people.

Hurston's essay reveals how socially constructed and therefore temporary the concept of racial discrimination ultimately is. Her metaphorical approach to describing herself and her world makes a compelling case: once perhaps the boundaries between white and Black carried the force of law and violence, but in the wake of freedom, she argues, those boundaries hold no solid moral ground. Hurston asks her readers to see racial difference not as a burden or a deficiency but as one thread in the rich fabric of human diversity.

Conclusion: The Reader's Experience and the Power of Literature

Each of the four essays discussed here may seem relatively straightforward at first sight. They may read like personal stories, but they are far more than that. Each author allows readers the opportunity to form their own thoughts and to examine different perspectives on a given situation. This openness can initially create the impression that there is no clear point being made — or only a very simple one. But the reality is that each of these four authors leads the reader toward a specific idea or insight through the careful use of language and personal evidence.

All four essays share a common thread: each features individuals confronted with prejudice. And all carry a message meant to convince the reader that prejudice should be abolished. The conclusion reached here is that the effect of such writing on any given reader depends entirely on whether that person has experienced prejudice personally. It does not matter whether the reader has been a victim or a perpetrator; either way, the impact of the reading will be far greater than it would be for someone who has never encountered a comparable situation. Beyond personal experience, the craft of the essay itself — its build-up, its relevance, and the resonance of its ending — also plays a critical role in determining whether a reader absorbs the moral lesson and carries it forward.

Staples's essay serves as a perfect illustration of this dynamic. A reader who has experienced or inflicted a similar act of racial discrimination is far more likely to draw a lasting moral lesson from his work and apply it toward the betterment of themselves and their community. Literature about prejudice, at its most effective, does not simply tell readers what to think — it places them inside an experience until they can no longer claim that it has nothing to do with them.

Bibliography

Angelou, Maya. "Graduation." Occasions for Writing: Evidence, Idea, Essay. DiYanni, Robert, and Pat C. Hoy. Boston, MA: Thomson Heinle, 2008. 335–342. Print.

Hurston, Zora. "How It Feels to Be Colored Me." Occasions for Writing: Evidence, Idea, Essay. DiYanni, Robert, and Pat C. Hoy. Boston, MA: Thomson Heinle, 2008. 159–161. Print.

Kincaid, Jamaica. "On Seeing England for the First Time." Occasions for Writing: Evidence, Idea, Essay. DiYanni, Robert, and Pat C. Hoy. Boston, MA: Thomson Heinle, 2008. 720–727. Print.

Staples, Brent. "Just Walk on By." Occasions for Writing: Evidence, Idea, Essay. DiYanni, Robert, and Pat C. Hoy. Boston, MA: Thomson Heinle, 2008. 153–155. Print.